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Thomas Aquinas' Big Pile of Straw

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Thomas Aquinas' Big Pile of Straw stoppage and an event that had happened on that Thomas same day, Dec. 6. It was the feast of St. Nicholas, and Thomas was in the chapel of St. Nicholas in Naples. Aquinas' Big He was Pile of Straw excited by an extraordinary alteration, and after that Mass never wrote or dictated anything; indeed, he On December 6, 1273 hung up his instruments of writing in the third part Saint Thomas Aquinas of the Summa, in the treatise on penance. stopped writing. He had certainly written It would obviously be wrong to picture Aquinas as plenty by then. He was changing his mind about the content of anything he not yet fifty years old, had written. And there may be a mundane reason for but had written about a hundred works: Thomas to have stopped producing, related to Commentaries on Scripture, collections of patristic whatever medical condition ended his life within the commentaries, sermons, philosophical treatises, year. But if Reginald’s story is accurate and relevant, explorations of disputed subjects, commentaries on it may also be that having written with exquisite Aristotle and Proclus and Boethius, and a couple of clarity for many years, Thomas received a visionary Summas. moment of clarity, and saw the object of his theological reasoning in a way that made further Saint Thomas was not done writing his Summa writing inadequate. Theologiae, his definitive work. The great Summa breaks off unfinished. To round off the fragment, Once, at the beginning of his Opusculum De Creaturis Thomas’ friend Reginald of Piperno pulled together Spiritualibus, Thomas had given a rough reason of sections from an earlier theological treatise why theologians do what they do: “Not being able to (Thomas’ commentary on Lombard’s Sentences), and do the work of the angels in choir, we can at least appended it to the Summa as The Supplement. write about them.” As he drew near to the destiny of doing the work of the angels gathered around God, Though Saint Thomas was used to producing at a perhaps the task of writing out theology, which was furious pace, on this day December 6, 1273, Thomas always a kind of compensation anyway, became less just stopped. When his friend Reginald urged him to urgent. keep dictating, Thomas replied: “I cannot, for everything I have written seems to me like straw.” Thomas Aquinas stopped writing December 6, 1273, considering all his writing as so much straw. Those of Reginald kept asking Aquinas for an explanation for us who soldier on with the task of theology recognize his silence, and finally got a longer answer: that it is a pretty admirable pile of straw, by just about any theological standard you want to apply. “I adjure you by the living almighty God, and by the But if you have the choice between reading the faith you have in our order, and by charity that you Summa and joining in the praise of God more strictly promise me you will never reveal in my directly, choose the latter. Thomas did; by the grace lifetime what I tell you. Everything that I have written of God. seems like straw to me compared to those things that I have seen and have been revealed to me.” Adapted from: http://scriptoriumdaily.com/thomas-aquinas-big-pile-of-straw/ How do we know this story? It is first recorded in the process for Thomas’ canonization as a saint in 1319, when Bartholomew of Capua said he heard it from John del Guidice, who heard it from Reginald. Reginald made a connection between the work .
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